World

Gay dating apps battle for supremacy in China

SHANGHAI—It wasn’t so long ago that "Geng Le," the former policeman who founded one of China’s earliest gay websites was being forced to play cat-and-mouse with the Chinese authorities just to keep it online.

When the government launched a campaign to "purify the Internet" in 2006, Geng’s site, danlan.org, was repeatedly shut down. Every time, he’d move his server to another city and launch again. "There was a time when we were constantly moving our servers," he said.

How times have changed. Geng’s website is now free to cover gay news from around the world, and even carries advertising for a company helping gay Chinese men start families through surrogacy in the U.S.

Three years ago, Geng launched a gay-dating app called Blued, which he claims is the most widely used globally, with 15 million users (including three million outside China.)

Employees at Blued, one of China's gay dating apps

Image: company handout

Now he’s eyeing global domination. After receiving $30 million in funding from a Silicon Valley venture capital firm late last year, Blued launched an English-language version of the app in February and set up offices in the U.S., Thailand and Taiwan. A Thai- and Spanish-language version of Blued is coming soon, along with a possible IPO.

Love at the police academy

When Geng, whose given name is Ma Baoli, graduated from university in 2000, he didn’t understand why he wasn’t interested in finding a girlfriend and getting married like his classmates. He went online in search of answers and was shocked to read on Chinese websites that being gay was considered a disease that needed to be treated.

"That’s why I started to have the idea that I wanted to build a website to show the public, the media and the authorities that being gay is absolutely normal," Geng says.

The CEO of Blued, a gay dating app in China

Soon after, he started danlan.org under the pseudonym Geng Le to protect his identity at his day job as a policeman. The website survived the government shutdowns until 2008 when the state-run Xinhua news agency ran a groundbreaking report about the struggles of gay people in China.

"I told my team that we might have the chance to witness China shifting from a country that discriminates against gays to a society that accepts them," he says. "Six years has passed, and I was proven right."

Government officials have lauded Geng for his work to prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS in China. These efforts, along with the newly open environment toward gays and lesbians in the country, allowed him to launch Blued in 2012.

The name is meaningful to Geng. When he was at the police academy, he fell in love with another recruit while training on the beach next to the blue sea. "I wanted to remember him, as well as the beautiful feelings from my youth," he says.

A gay wedding in Beijing, gay ’Friends’ on TV

Blued is the most widely used gay-dating app in China but it now has competition. In 2013, a new gay-dating app called Zank appeared on the scene, launched by a computer engineer who goes by the pseudonym, Ling Jueding. (His real name is Hou Jiliang.)

Ling also struggled with his sexuality until reading a best-selling — and controversial — book called Homosexuality in China, written by a sexologist in the mid-1990s. "When we were young, we were restricted by our parents and when we grew up, we were restricted by society," Ling tells Mashable. "We were too restricted by the environment to live for ourselves."

Things are changing quickly. Although gay marriage is not legal in China, and many people still hide their sexuality from family and friends, Ling married his partner, Gino Chen, in a ceremony in Beijing last month—the day after the U.S. Supreme Court legalized gay marriage in the U.S.

And his app is making dating easier for the next generation. He estimates Zank has about 8 million users, nearly all of them in China. The company received $3.2 million in private funding last year and launched an English-language version in June. But Ling says he’s not focused on overseas expansion — yet.

"China is a big market full of potential," he says.

Zank is perhaps best known in the West for its likeness to the popular Boston-based gay-dating app Jack’d.

Ling admits "learning and borrowing some advantages from Jack’d,” but maintains his app puts a higher priority on social-networking groups for users with shared interests, such as swimming and badminton.

Zank has has also expanded into other forms of entertainment, producing a popular television serial for WeChat and Youku (the Chinese YouTube) about a group of gay men living with a straight woman in Beijing—a mixture of 'Friends' and 'Looking.'

"It’s very smart marketing — creating something to make gay people feel a sense of belonging," says Xing Zhao, a 34-year-old menswear designer in Shanghai who watches the show and uses Zank occasionally for dating.

Can Grindr keep pace?

Blued and Zank have done well locally because they know how young Chinese millennials communicate — both have a WeChat-like 'Moments' feed, for example, where users can post vacation photos or other pictures from daily life. Blued also has an LGBT newsfeed and travel maps to find gay spots in cities like Toronto and Los Angeles.

But Grindr isn’t giving up. Blocked by the Chinese government until June 2011, the app’s user numbers have been steadily climbing ever since, though a spokesman for the company declined to give current figures. The company is also increasing its profile in China by partnering with the Beijing Gender Health and Education Institute to raise awareness of gay rights in the country.

Xing, the menswear designer, prefers the Chinese apps. But he’s quick to note that in terms of the guys, it doesn’t really matter which one you use.

"I think a lot of people are on all these apps," he says. "So it’s always the same people."

Mashable
is a global, multi-platform media and entertainment company. Powered by its own proprietary technology, Mashable is the go-to source for tech, digital culture and entertainment content for its dedicated and influential audience around the globe.